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Stacked switches not showing individual switch data

Table of contents

Overview

This article explains why the individual switch data cannot be viewed when monitoring a stack of switches.

Environment

NPM 10.5 to NPM 11.5.3

All stacked switches

Detail

When switches are stacked, the other member switches of the stack act as ports for the management switch. When the stack is polled, a communication with the management switch occurs. If it does not give data on the other members of the stack, then these will not show up in the report. The other members of the stack cannot be polled individually unless they have IP addresses that are in NPM.

There are several possible workarounds to that can be implemented however to infer the status of the stack switches.

Universal Device Pollers can be used to monitor switch interfaces for instances to infer the availability of the switch.

Although not full proof, it will trigger an alert when the stack switch goes down. More options can be found under the thwack post provided below: